Nine Years of Elizabeth Cotton Pajamas

January 23, 2014

As of this week we have been in business for nine years. I know that because I woke up this morning to discover that our website had essentially been erased from the internet and our homepage was replaced with a page full of ads asking me if I wanted to buy a bike. Apparently when I purchased the domain name it was for 9 years exactly, so Happy Anniversary to us!

Thankfully we got things sorted out relatively quickly (many thanks to my husband who skipped work to patiently wait on hold all morning with the domain reseller in Australia while I was on hold with Yahoo/having a nervous breakdown). For a while when we got the website up again the first homepage that was reactivated was one from 2009, anyone remember this? Even though its links were broken and we were still not back in business it was kind of like seeing a familiar friend. I miss those green stripes.

As I sat on hold all morning I kept thinking how grateful I would be if we could get the domain name back, and just in general how much had changed since the day I sat down with a bunch of fabric swatches and an idea and decided to buy www.elizabethcotton.com.

After that day I quit my full-time job and worked as a freelancer for 4 different companies while running Elizabeth Cotton on the side until finally our sales reached the point where I could justify working for myself full-time. After that day I got engaged, then married, and then had three amazing little girls. We moved four times.

Fred Segal in Los Angeles was the first retail store to place an order. Our pajamas were in the Horchow catalog, then Neiman Marcus, and then Nordstrom. Red Envelope placed the largest order we had received to date and then promptly filed for Chapter 11 shortly after we shipped them all the merchandise. It took almost 4 years to receive partial payment for that order!

Our products made it into "InStyle", "Vogue", and "O, The Oprah Magazine", ultimately being included in the Holiday 2009 "O" List, which was amazing.

For the past year or two we haven't been selling products in many stores as it just became too hard to travel to the trade shows with three little ones. I miss working with retailers but have been enjoying working on our online shop, and if you are a repeat customer you should know that while our online business is growing quickly, we are still small enough that I recognize many of your names as orders come in, and and am so grateful for the support that you have shown this small business. Thank you, Thank you, Thank you!

So, Happy Anniversary to us! It has been a wonderful nine years and I am so excited about what the future will bring. Right now we are working on improvements to existing products and ideas for Holiday 2014. If you have any feedback you would like to share regarding our current products or requests for new ones, I would love to hear from you!